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The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs starts with him having arrived in Poplar in the early 1930s. On spec he turns up at a steel foundry and luckily gets a job. His digs are with an old couple in Bow where he has to share a single bed (head to toe) with their mentally retarded son.Life in the foundry is grim but William is indomitable. For recreation one day he cycles (then in the days before inflatable tyres) to Berkhamstead to try and track down an old girlfriend. She's not there and he has to return in a snowstorm - it takes him eight hours to get back to Poplar and then he has to get up three hours later to work at the foundry.Eventually he decides to 'get some leernin' and his first white collar job starts for the water board in ... Brettenham House! He continues to pursue his studies, finally winning a place at Ruskin College, Oxford. How the ex-steel worker became an Oxford academic - and William's concluding description of returning from the war to meet the son he's never seen - is deeply moving.

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William Woodruff was born in 1916 into a family of Blackburn, Lancashire cotton workers. At 13 he left school and became a delivery boy in a grocer's shop. In 1933, with bleak prospects in the north of England, he decided to try his luck in London and migrated to the filth and squalor of the East End. Then in 1936 with the encouragement of a Jesuit priest and the aid of a London County Council Scholarship he went to Balliol College, Oxford. There he became an idealistic undergraduate who mingled with George Woodcock and Harold Wilson. During the Second World War he fought in North Africa and the Mediterranean region as a major and then a colonel. All these experiences formed the basis of a series of memoirs, including The Road to Nab End, originally published as Billy Boy, and Beyond Nab End, which emerged only years later.

After the war, he turned down the chance of a political career in favour of academia. He was lured to Harvard on a scholarship and remained in America teaching economic history in Illinois, Princeton and Florida, until he was 80. 61 published titles - hardbacks, softbacks and translations - bear his name.